an honest forum for military spouses

There is nothing like having a partner on a submarine for six months. It means months on end with no contact. The only comparable situation would be if Sam were kidnapped in North Korea. I was not prepared for what this would feel like. There is no one to tell about a particularly rough commute, a conflict I managed at work, a meeting with government officials that went well. No one with whom to share the story of that amazing apple cinnamon muffin and latte I bought at a coffee shop I just discovered down the road. No one to laugh with over Onion headlines. Then there are the joint decisions that become mine because Sam and I cannot discuss them. Like when I had to decide whether or not to renew my apartment lease for another year, with no information about the location of Sam’s next navy assignment. Or what to tell the career counselor I was meeting with about my preferences for job type and location during my next gig—decisions that Sam’s next placement would ideally inform. But things like being able to tell Sam about a really good apple cinnamon muffin or to vent about a colleague at work are, I realize now, equally important as these life decisions. Details are the stuff of relationships, and during deployment, the details are few. I’ll work backwards in telling my deployment story. Now, in the last month, I feel raw anger. I’m pissed off at everyone–but no one in particular—because Sam is gone. I find reasons to shove other people on the train on the way to work. I threaten harassment charges against the Toyota salesman who will not stop calling to get me to trade in my used model for a newer one. I stop trusting myself to send e-mails to colleagues and friends over things as simple as where meetings or get-togethers will take place; I’m afraid I’ll write something snarky, like, “It would be nice if you could compromise a little and meet me somewhere in the middle,” in response to a friend who wants to come up from a neighboring city for a visit, when really, what I want is for my partner’s job to allow him to meet me a little more in the middle. So I save everything in my drafts folder, wait an hour, and reread and edit before sending. I snap at the woman hovering over me at the corner boutique suggesting which scarf would look good with my skin tone, telling her that I don’t feel like talking to anyone. In the few months before this angry stage, I had a budding realization: That I need friendships with other women whose spouses are in the military. During the beginning of Sam’s tour, I tired of other spouses because I felt that they were too focused on doing things for the men on the boat. Even the navy-sponsored Family Readiness Group, whose name implies it is supposed to help families get ready for the stresses of military life, seemed to be way too focused on providing services for sailors. Then by chance, I got to know the wife of another officer on Sam’s boat, Renee. She began to call to check in during deployment. I realized that we have a lot in common in terms of our professional interests and our outlook on navy life. I discovered that it was possible to talk to Renee about my frustrations without her judgment. What’s more, she shares my interests in social justice and also struggles to merge a challenging career with her partner’s navy career. I realized my folly in dismissing spouses’ groups as oppressive extensions of the military—which they can certainly be, but not always. I resolved to make myself a part of the next spouse’s group and selectively choose which events I will become apart of. The first stage of deployment was a roller coaster of moods. On the kitchen table of the condo we share, Sam left me a gift for each month that he would be gone. I arrived home from a trip to find a new pizza stone waiting for me, and I spent the weekend baking. I happily imagined the sequence of treats that I had given Sam to open on a monthly basis—from chocolate-covered Oreos one month, to a scrapbook documenting the first years of our relationship. I clung to these gifts as tangible ways in which the two of us would be together. Intermixed with romance was frustration as I realized how restrained Sam’s time would be. I blew up because he had only a few minutes to call me during his port stops, and because I had to be there to answer the phone when he called. I balked when I realized that between port calls, I would not be receiving emails from him at all. I began to experience what it was like to be both partnered and alone. I set time-consuming, solitary projects to pursue during deployment: learning to make chocolate filled croissants, writing a short story, training for a half marathon. I started, but didn’t finish, any of these projects, but I realized that the point is doing something, not necessarily finishing anything. I realized a few other things: (1) that Sam and I, all things considered, are good at managing this separation, (2) that I hate deployment, (3) and that I need a community firmly in place next time from the outset, whether it is a family of my own, a local network of friends in my new city, or a group of spouses in the same situation. I wonder if it might in some ways be more feasible to survive a deployment with children. Would having someone to take care of ease the loneliness? Or does the exhaustion of singlehandedly caring for someone outweigh the benefits? What are the experiences of other child-free women while their partners are deployed? Of men?

“Thank you for your service.” Sam hears this in airports when we check our bags, while we’re waiting for one of us to get on a train after a weekend together, on the street in the small town where he lives. When I hear someone say that to him, I feel a mix of pride, perplexity, and irritation. Pride because Sam values contributing to something larger than himself, yet he is so humble that all he can do is whisper thank you in response to their acknowledgment. Irritation because we are both, by default, serving, what with the long separations and workdays, frequent moves, limited vacation time, and uncertainty about where we will be and what we will be doing next year. If anything, both of us should be thanked for our service. Perplexity because “Thank you for your service” suggests to me that many people view military service as altogether different from other professions that enhance American lives. Why are teachers not thanked for their service when they whip out their educator discount cards at Barnes and Noble? What about the garbage men who appear every Wednesday morning to haul off the refuse of the tens of thousands of people in my urban neighborhood? I believe that this message is borne of blind reverence for the military borne of the stark cultural divide between civilian and military families. It comes from civilians’ gratitude that they are not the ones who have to live this life or even understand what it entails. Of course, military life is different and separate. Military housing, if families choose to live there, exists in separate developments. Bases are fenced in, barbed wire-lined structures that look like prisons but that have many of the things families need at discounted rates: banks, grocery stores, playgrounds, psychological counseling, even chapels. So that’s where much of military families’ daily lives take place. The number of events that military families are expected to attend together makes it difficult to imagine how they would build active social lives with civilian families in surrounding communities, were they to do everything that is asked of them—and many of them do. Then there are the constant warnings that if you reveal the tiniest thing about your service member spouse’s activities to the outside world, you will do something to compromise national security. I like to imagine a world in which military social functions were open to anyone local who wished to attend, in which military sponsored childcare--what little there is--was part of larger community-based childcare facilities, and after school activities for military youth were simply subsidized programs that allowed kids in military families to easily afford things like summer camp and ballet lessons with other children. When I speak to my coworkers and acquaintances who are not part of military families, I feel a bit like an oddball. The other day a neighbor stared at me with incredulity when I explained that Sam would be gone for another four months on deployment; that we cannot correspond with one another in any way during that time; that I’m not really sure when he is getting back; so no, we are not yet planning anything special, because if we get plane tickets to go to Europe, we might be wasting about a grand should his return be postponed. She said, “Oh my goodness, that sounds so hard. I can’t imagine. I don’t know how you do it.” And she shook her head back and forth. Her expression was meant to convey her empathy for how difficult it sounded to go through this and it is difficult. But the effect was one of reinforcing my “otherness.” It is saying that my life is unimaginable. The opposite end of the spectrum is this insular incestuous feeling when I receive an e-mail from our spouse’s group announcing that we will be gathering soon to make care packages for “our guys,” which feels something like being part of a harem of strangers. What I would like is for my acquaintances in the civilian world to know and understand what I am going through—namely, that life is difficult but doable. I want them to say things like “Kudos to you for making it all work,” rather than, “Oh gosh, I can’t imagine….” I want my supervisor to understand when I need to take vacation days at the spur of the moment to go visit Sam at a port call, and I want people to thank me for my service, whether they agree with what the military does or not, and whether or not they think that I do. In the country where I spend a large portion of time for work, there is a draft. Everyone knows someone who has served, and they know it is not easy. They know what it is like to have family members whose lives are constantly in danger or who spend a large portion of their time as targets. They know what it is like to have the men they love owned by someone else and out of contact for long periods of time. When I tell them about Sam, they nod with understanding, and they say, “Good for you, for having the kind of relationship that survives distance and time”; or even “Must feel good when you get back together after a long separation.” They also have horror stories, of men who had their legs blown off or who came back from war so traumatized that no one, even their own spouses or children, really recognized them. But the point is that military service is something they are intimately familiar with and they do not treat me like a being apart. In many ways, the thought of a draft frightens me. Yet there are things the military could do to make it easier for military families to feed less of their time and labor into supporting the troops and more time interacting with their wider communities.

Before Sam left for a recent deployment, he told me that the first months of his mission would be a crucial turning point in his navy career. He would be told where in the world he was likely to be stationed for his next navy job and what he would be doing during this period of “shore duty.” (For those of you who do not know what shore duty is, it’s a period of time—usually about two years—when they say sailors will be working more of a 9-6 schedule and traveling just a few days out of the month.) Many of Sam’s conversations about his job prospects for shore duty would take place with more senior officers on the boat, who had the ability to influence the navy’s decisions, while they were all underwater and incommunicado. Consequently, I would not be apprised of these decisions until the day when Sam surfaced. They would be discussing which jobs had opened up, where these jobs were located, what Sam would be doing if he took them, and how soon these jobs would begin. Some positions would start two or three months after Sam returned from deployment, meaning that if he took one of them, we both would spend our brief post-deployment reunion finding a place and moving our joint belongings there. For months, I was excluded from a conversation that would play a key role in the shape my life, my career path, and our relationship would take. I thought: Could I start looking at jobs in a nearby city where Sam could be stationed? Or should I contemplate freelance work for the period when my current job ended and I would have the opportunity to be in the same city as Sam? Would Sam and I be flying from coast to coast every other weekend to see one another and planning Skype dates to accommodate our two different time zones? Or could we spontaneously connect after our respective workdays were over? Would Sam and I have a few months of normal life—of cooking dinner together, watching the John Stewart show and Project Runway in the evenings, and planning Saturday outings to new hiking trails? Or should I scramble to save enough vacation days to allow for maximum travel time later on? The possibilities were endless and I was left contemplating broad hypothetical questions rather than the set of concrete paths that Sam was contemplating with a group of men on a boat. Job uncertainty is difficult to deal with under normal circumstances when your loved one is around, but it is especially trying when all you have of a relationship is the abstract prospect that you will spend time with each other soon. During those few months, a growing sense of unease made my already difficult job as an activist more difficult, and I could not help but feel a little hopeless, thinking, will I have to choose between being with my love and pursuing work that is meaningful? Is the report I am compiling right now a culmination of my still young career, or will it jump start me to greater opportunities? If the latter, does that mean continuing to live apart from Sam? I thought of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, in which she advises women “not to leave before you leave”—not to scale back on our ambitions and commitments to our current jobs in anticipation to leave the workforce to devote more time to our families. This makes sense, but emotionally, I found myself in a state of limbo. Leaning in, for me, feels less purposeful if I have to face an impossible choice imposed by people I don’t know. In the end, Sam and I were more lucky than we might have been. He came into port a few days before the official list of job possibilities was published and handed to him, though he was aware of what might be on it long before that. We had decided that he would say nothing final about our preferences to the navy until we had discussed these possibilities and what they would mean for our relationship. Sam held true to that, presenting me with a list of about 10 different jobs from Japan to Virginia. During my face to face conversations with him during a port call, a surprising thing happened. Rather than feeling as threatened as I might be about the far-flung ports where Sam could be stationed, I felt a sense of excitement at wherever we might end up together. This was because I was at least being included in a decision-making process by Sam, who happened to be in port. The navy had not done anything to make this easy for us. In the end, Sam requested and got a job that put us both in an advantageous place for our careers and our life together. Why, given the navy's vested interest in recruiting partners into its volunteer work, do they fail to make them part of a conversation that affects them in equal measure? What harm would there be in providing notice to partners who are waiting on shore about what the possibilities are under discussion, and to include them in these discussions? The only answer I can think of is sheer negligence and incompetence on the part of naval authorities. The navy intervenes in family relationships where they deem advantageous to them. For example, when one woman married to an officer on the boat recently sent him an e-mail threatening to drain their joint bank account and leave if he did not return in several weeks, the captain intercepted the email and “ordered” her to go to therapy. If only the navy made empowering interventions that kept partners informed of decisions affecting their own futures, perhaps such desperate situations would occur less often.

About

This is a blog about my experiences as the wife of a naval officer.

However, I would prefer if it were no longer about my experiences ONLY.

I want this to be an open forum for partners and spouses of military service members from all branches and ranks - including officer and enlisted - to speak openly about their experiences as family members of those serving in the armed forces.

You need not share my perspectives and views. The only requirement is that you are honest and have something original to say.

Please submit your story to rockingtheboat2013@gmail.com, and I will be in touch.